Living Clockwork
by NorthernTrash-x
Summary: Mayuri/Izuru. Because all Mayuri wanted was perfection, and a pair of eyes that didn't scream.


Mayuri x Kira

**Breathing Clockwork**

"_Don't wanna waste no more time  
Time's what we don't have  
Everywhere I look someone dies  
Wonder when it's my turn__"  
_Biffy Clyro

Mayuri liked to think of himself as an observer of creation, not an impartial one, but one always looking to alter and change things the way that he saw fit, one who still had a thousand questions that he needed answering about the world.

If he could have done so, he would have wired up the trees and read the overall pulse of them, all across Soul Society, just to see if they all beat with the same rhythm, just to see if the ground that it was rooted in had its own universal heartbeat. If it was up to him then the nights would be much shorter: people would be prone to less sleep then, and his division, not to mention the rest of the world, would be much more efficient. He would, if he could have done so, take hollows and pre-create them, to see what their origins were: for some reason, that proposal had been shot down by those damned ignorant powers that be time and time again. He was not normally one for following the rules, but that would have been an impossible experiment to carry out undetected. One day, one day. Things that were banned, they were always the most interesting- he theorised that, perhaps, it had been the shinigami who had created them to begin with. Or, maybe, an ancient civilised race that they had destroyed, and had then turned into monstrosities.

Yes, there were many things that he would have done given the right opportunity, but the most pressing was his constant striving to make the perfect person.

He looked at the human body and saw a vast and beautiful piece of machinery, the sort that one could only gape at, for all its complicated and delicate pieces that, no matter how learned you were, always just managed to look like it would be too hard for you to grasp. The systems that made it up could well have been designed by the ingenious hand of someone… well, someone like him, for all their brilliance and creativity. The intricate fittings of each part to another was pure genius, the reflective symmetry of the cordons and the bones a work of unadulterated art.

The only flaw to the whole thing, he had often noticed, was that chemical imbalance that was not even visible unless you had the right things to view it with, the part of the brain that made emotions and feelings and concerns. Such things did not equate to his own ideal of perfection, and as such he attempted to change his creations thus. Unfortunately, the first batch came out with no ability to rationalise, or calculate, or make decisions in battle. As such they were useless, except for the servants he kept around the place, to pass him things when he needed them. Of course, he also kept them as living incubators for various growing organs, some natural, some the synthetic sort of his own design, that he was obliged to periodically give to the Fourth division.

Honestly though, he was often heard to mutter when notification came that they were running low, if they cared so much about it, then they should try making their own. He wouldn't have trusted them with his precious organs at all, had it not been for the fact that, when he had complained, the Captain-Commander had threatened to reduce the budget he was given every decade for research and other useful… things.

His later creations managed to get over the failures of the first, but new and unpleasant side effects cropped up, such as imagination, and even free will. Such things were deplorable in servitude, and many had been incinerated so as not to pollute the rest of the crop. He viewed his creations in that way: not as people, but more like plants that he had grown with an uncaring hand and meticulous understanding of soil and sunlight. The sort of crops that you would routinely spray with pesticides, just to keep them fresh, and would then rip from the ground and devour.

But plants did not have emotions, and plants did not have feelings. Well, maybe they did, but they didn't scream loudly enough for him to hear, so he couldn't bring himself to care.

But man? Man had that horrible coil of reaction inside of him, which shone out through the eyes and accented the voice. Oh, how he longed to hear a voice completely free from feeling!

The ghost in the machine, as it were, plagued him constantly. He could see it, sometimes, behind his Lieutenant-daughter-creation's eyes, flickering in the dark pools of detached awareness, just waiting to come out. More than once, he had woken up with a shiver, sure that she would have finally heard its voice calling to her, and would have snuck to his bedside to slit his throat open as he slept. Logically, he knew that she was too much of a broken animal to ever rise up against him now, and that she wouldn't have got close to him without setting off the various traps that he (ever vigilant, ever paranoid) had stationed around himself, but logic did not ever apply in nightmares.

He would lie back when he was woken like that, and curse himself for not having found the answer yet.

Do not be fooled that Mayuri did not notice the hypocrisy of his own ideals: he knew well that he was, originally, as human as all of the rest of those bags of flesh and blood and bone out there, and just as prone to emotion. But the different between him and them was that he was trying to escape such feelings, such similarities: firstly physical, by extracting organ and nerves, and hiding his real appearance behind layers of caked on disguise. As soon as he had worked out how to do it, he would create a way to change the mental, as well.

He longed for clockwork, clockwork that breathed and spoke and understood. The sort of clockwork that was still, for all his advancement, far out of his grasp.

Such a shame, really.

Because, finally, he had a test subject who was willing to have such a procedure: a shinigami who was quite out of sorts, and who didn't really know what he was signing up for (not that such a misconception would ever have been an ethical dilemma worthy of halting Mayuri) and who routinely came to be tested and worked on, to lie down on the great, cold, metal lab table and let the Captain explore. The man, who had lost his wife to war had come to find absolution in anaesthetic and syringes, wanting to be rid of his emotions.

And it was very interesting. Mayuri had never had the chance to experiment on an _actual_ shinigami before- those in charge were very picky about their people. So, he had had his fun with enemies, with the Quincy and Arrancar and a few more besides that, and he had poked and prodded things of his own design, like Nemu, but they were as dissimilar to the real thing as a book was to a state of the art computer, bearing the same script on screen.

Not as satisfying, perhaps, but much more efficient.

For example, in real people, the veins and arteries ran much closer to the surface, showing up in bold blue lines as various points of the body where the skin shone nearly translucently pale. What beautiful folly was this? Surely they should have been placed (as he did) much deeper under the surface, on the safe side? Likewise, was there any need for so many of their nerves to be so very sensitive? They only needed to carry messages, not pick up outward sensation as well: the insides of Nemu's thighs, for instance, were toned and creamily-coloured and completely numb to touch, for it had seemed a waste of time to build any such receptors there.

So why did people have so many, ones that they would never use? Why did they have organs, in fact, that seemed pointless, and why did they carry around brains half of which they did not even utilize? Of course, he knew that he had once been like that himself, but he had fixed those problems with his own approach of simple minded ingenuity.

And when he looked in mirrors, he never looked in his eyes. He didn't want to see that tell-tale ghost staring back at himself. It was that, though of course not that alone, that sent him spiraling into an anger that none could calm unless enough got in the way of his fists.

"There is too much in your eyes," he announced one day, slamming his hands against the desk in agitation, for though he would not admit it, looking at eyes like that made him lose focus. He glared down at the man who looked back up, resigned. Mayuri smiled in a way that was meant to be resigned, and suggested that perhaps the world was not as bad as he thought. For a moment, the anonymous shinigami seemed to consider that thought, but it was too late, too late.

The world swam, a patina of colours from the last and lethal dose injected into him, and though he strained against the binds that held him tight and unmoving he could not escape. His breath came quicker and quicker, until he fell back, leather biting into his skin, raising red welts. He was crying, bleeding, but he did not notice: it took him a while to realise that the laughter echoing around the cavernous room was his own, on the slight verge of hysteria. The colours were no longer making sense, as if a God had come and placed a whole new palette in front of his eyes for his appraisal. Except there was no God, only the Captain in front of him, who had already turned away, becoming lost in the hazy shadows of the places that were not his body, nerves lit in a fire of ecstasy and pain.

"Don't like my eyes, boss? Go ask the third division a question, next Captain's meeting. Then, you'll see."

What a strange thing to have said, Mayuri thought as he continued to walk away, not turning as the laughter died away to shallow breathing and laboured screams, the words not quieting in his mind, only getting louder. What an… interesting thing to put forward, as the last thing you would ever say.

Perhaps he would look into it.

The man did not show up at work the next day, but he had taken a few off, lately, and it wasn't like he was perfectly _'all there' _even when he was at work, these days, was it? It took four days before people questioned where he was, but by that point his body was far out of reach of even the most inquisitive of searchers, and there were none of those. Most people assumed that he had simply wandered off, left in grief; a carefully worded note of resignation was found after a week, placed on the desk of their Lieutenant, though none of the third division could quite remember seeing who had put it there, or even when it had arrived.

Kira had sighed as he had read it, and filled in a resignation form with the same one-minded indifference that he completed most of his routine work, and that of a missing Captain.

Mayuri, on the other hand, was wild with curiosity. As he always was when hit with something as striking as that unimportant man's death-words; like fucked up insects they crawled through his conscious, sometimes flitting, sometimes disgraced and dragging engorged bodies along, glutted with the imaginary blood of Mayuri's terrifying thoughts. They were not to be suppressed until swatted with the mental hand of the realisation of such desires: then, the stains were soon rubbed away by the arrival of new insects to join the buzzing crowd that bounced off the walls of his skull until he thought he might have to cleave his own head open to let them get out.

But, you know, that was just how he liked to think about it.

The next Captain's meeting was not until the next day. He considered, for a moment as he left the labs, creating some sort of emergency that would prompt one sooner, but threw that idea to the side. He had created one too many shambling monstrosities- the Captain Commander was just starting to _assume_ that they were all the result of his creativity now.

So, he waited, for after all, it would only be another sixteen hours, forty minutes and thirty-eight seconds. He could survive that, could he not? He sat in his office- dusty, for he rarely used it- and wrote out elaborate experiments, difficult hypotheses and complex equations, breaking on occasion to oversee some mundane detail of the works of his division, who were always busy with projects that their Captain had thought of but had no patience or inclination to do himself. They were rather disconcerted by his presence but, after all, wasn't everybody?

The morning dawned grey and overcast, but Mayuri had not slept- he had long ago added stimulants of his own creation to his blood that decreased his need to sleep by seven eighths- and he was working on reducing it further. A murder of crows flocked outside his window, black feathers blocking out the light for a moment as they pecked and scratched at the glass. He watched them, smiling.

They had grown bold, feeding off the scraps of flesh in the refuse of the building, and he liked that: natural born survivors. He thought it might be time to exterminate them, regardless, though they did prove a natural deterrent for the surprising number of intruders. Perhaps he would keep one or two- it might be interesting to see their internal skeleton, to see if he could replicate that honey-comb lightness into his creations, just to find out if he could make them as light and durable as birds. At worst, he could watch the results of such an experiment fall on shattering limbs and laugh as they struggled to remember what it was that they were feeling: he liked to make his creations numb to pain sometimes, because the confusion made for great entertainment. Almost as much as the ones who had too high pain receptors: their screams were his lullabies at night.

What mandate had ever decreed that he had to be nice to those in his command? He was mother and father and teacher and master; he killed them with the same abstracted curiosity with which he created them.

He liked to see how much pain registered on them before they died. He liked to see the mask of pain in their death-frozen faces. He found it faintly interesting.

Not as interesting, he realised as he arrived at the meeting, as the man who had been standing in for the Captain of the Third division. He stood tall and firm but with his head bowed, clearly knowing his place: Mayuri struggled to remember if he had ever contributed anything in a meeting, but since he himself was rarely paying attention he supposed that he could have done, and he simply hadn't been listening. Either way, his focus had skimmed over this somewhat drab looking character every time: he recalled that he had been imprisoned at the time of all that fuss, for they thought that he was another traitor. That was the most interesting thing he could remember about him, and it wasn't particularly secret or profane knowledge.

The meeting progressed, dull as it always was.

This time, though, he listened.

Direction turned to that of the acting Captains: by the sighs in the room it was a tired topic. If replacements had not been found then it was clear that there were none, was the Captain Commander's response, and accusing eyes were turned to Kuchiki, who blankly ignored them. Was it his fault that his Lieutenant refused to apply for promotion? There were muttered words of annoyance, before the warm and calming voice of Unohana soothed the room with the assurance that it didn't matter so much, surely, since everything was functioning smoothly?

Mayuri saw his opening.

"I am not so sure that it is."

He made a temple with his fingers and rested his chin on it, his voice a little wheedling and deeply disturbing. The man looked up, and oh!

Those eyes.

Now he could see what the dead man had meant.

They were everything that he had hoped to create: full of absolute stillness and grey, grey, grey, grey. Quite unlovely, quite perfect. There was a complete lack of emotion in their subaqueous depths, like that of still water reflecting a cloud hung low with steely rain. Rimmed with pale lashes, they were framed by nothing but their own potency, and the net of red lace that had shot the white with the blood of fatigue. They looked almost like how one would imagine Death's eyes to look like, if He ever had walked the earth in mortal form, but there was a radiance of blue about them, too, the blue of the sky hidden behind those layers of metal-and-water cloud. He could imagine removing them, and replacing his own with them. But then, that would never do: he knew well that the deus ex machina that he was attempting to obliterate was a part of the construct of the mind, not physical at all. Still, though… it was a tempting thought.

Mayuri liked his eyes, perhaps too much.

"I would suggest that the substituting Third Division leader is looking a little… under the weather."

Heads turned at that, including the object of appraisal. It was not often that Mayuri said something that sounded vaguely concerned, and they knew well that it normally only ever carried the ramifications of selfishness.

"Perhaps it is slowing down his work?"

An almost inaudible sigh of relief; this was much more the Kurotsuchi that they knew, loathed, feared. One who worked for personal gain, one with a manic smile and an appreciation for the sublimely horrific. Was the third division's slack causing some offence to the Twelfth? All divisions owed some sort of link to his and Unohana's work, though they were much less inclined to admit to depending on Mayuri.

"Maybe he should be offered something to tide him over?"

"I-"

"Oh, I don't mean help. One does not interfere in the running of another division, I know that I would not _appreciate_ it if anyone did the same to me. No, what I mean, is perhaps you would care for something to pick you up, a little."

He lifted his hands, palms out, and raised his eyebrows.

"Nothing dangerous, just something new. Not yet on the market, as it were."

There were murmurs of discontent from the listening room. All wished to offer the hapless Lieutenant some word of advice- well, most of them, anyway- but to do so could prove to be insulting to Kurotsuchi, and none of them wanted to do that. He was unpredictable even to himself, and besides: who wanted to be the one denied the latest technology, the latest advances?

Kira was on edge. His position was balanced on a precipice as it was- to offend a Captain might result in stronger assertions that a new leader for the Third Division was necessary, and he wasn't ready for that yet. But, to align himself with the aid of Kurotsuchi… no one sane could see that as a reasonable and sensible decision. Even the man who had first brought him out of his solitary cell (where it might have been better he remained) had not deemed it wise, just as the best thing to do in order not to let so brilliant a mind to go to waste. After all, was genius that far removed from insanity?

Kira had a moment to decided, and his natural politeness won out.

"I would… appreciate such concern, Captain."

The room was silent with shock, even the apathetic Kyouraku and the continuously ambivalent Zaraki staring at him, wide-eyed. The quiet was heavy, Kira himself stunned at what he had agreed to (whatever that was, indeed) and Mayuri exultant with success. It was broken after a long and awkward moment by a barking laugh from Zaraki, the sought that denotes little humour and more a delayed reaction.

"S' brave of you, kid. I'd have ya at the Eleventh, just for that."

Mayuri, for the first time, turned his disconcerting smile to meet the pale and bare face of Kira, who was now looking all the more concerned.

"I will make you feel better, far better."

Kira shivered.

The meeting broke up soon after.

* * *

Kira followed the instruction of the message delivered to him to the word, arriving at the Twelfth Division at three o'clock that afternoon. He hadn't realised that the Captain had intended to start this soon, but he supposed that he didn't know how long Kurotsuchi had been waiting for an opportunity for testing out this new… thing.

He was lead from the front gate by a silent guide who wore an expression similar to that of the Lieutenant of this division: in fact, they looked quite similar, as well. Kira would have asked if they were sisters, perhaps cousins, but he was too perceptive for that, and there was something about this girl, like the other, that spoke of something entirely... unnatural.

In fact, nothing in this place seemed right.

The researchers all moved with a unison of complete intent and worrying focus, all somehow different from the rest of the world in a way that he knew he would never have been able to describe. The closest thing to it, he would have said, was to see a current near the surface of a lake, something that moved along against the almost indolent lethargy of the rest of the water. All one thing, but these people had an intensity that made them stand out.

He felt, here, like an outsider amongst outsiders, for only the very strangest of people ended up underneath the tyrannical rod of Mayuri Kurotsuchi.

A door was held open for him, and he was lead into the inner sanctum of the labs: here, all was quite still, and there were only the smallest numbers of people working, as opposed to the hive. The droning noise from outside was here muffled to the lowest of hums, almost undetectable.

Mayuri stalked between the benches, like a great cat held in the captivity of his master, waiting for the day to break free, to maul the faces of the children who poked sticks through the bars of his cage.

Kira stilled for a moment, and his guide turned to him, face impassive. But he had never been frail, nor a coward: his hesitation was momentary.

That was, until he was lead to a large and chill table, upon which great leather restraints rested, undone. Mayuri appeared on the other side of it, but was not paying attention to him: instead, he was leafing through piles of paper, examining jars up to the light, such a constant chaotic symphony of movement that each individual action soon became blurred behind the random nature of each. The woman turned to him, and inclined her head in a supplicating bow.

"Please, remove your clothing."

Kira stared at her, forehead knitting together as he took a step back and fisted a protective hand into the collar of his uniform, as if she were already trying to rip it from him and leave him bare and pale and shivering.

"What? Why?"

Mayuri turned his intentionally bland stare on him, the one that only looked a little bit crazy. As opposed to his normal one, that just about managed a shade above deranged. He spoke, and his voice was laced with a thick anticipation.

"For tests, of course. Oh, don't worry about them- they probably won't even understand what they're seeing."

Kira looked around him at the women who had not even glanced in their direction at the words, which must surely have been loud enough for them to hear, and with cautious glances to either side, began to disrobe.

"Are they all women?"

"What?"

"Your… workers. All the ones I've seen are women."

"This is my private lab. Only my loyal creations and myself and certain… test subjects are allowed in here. There are others outside."

Kira shut his mouth, though that did not to any stretch answer his question. The evading and almost insultingly secretive manner was not what did it, and he was not subdued by embarrassment: rather, by the fact that Mayuri had drawn his zanpakuto, and was staring at it as if there was nothing else on planet. Deep in conversation, no doubt, Kira thought. He stripped himself of his uniform, his skin pale and bare and prickling with the cold. He lay down on the table, and shuddered at the cold metal.

"Rip, Ashisogi Jizo," Kurotsuchi said, almost voluptuously, savouring the words in his mouth as he said them in his strange, high-pitched and mocking voice.

Kurotsuchi's zanpakuto was from the depths of hell, and now all it did was split into three: Ashisogi Jizo was just as much an abomination as his master, though Kira did not know that as the deformed, serpentine trident materialised and then moved closer and closer to his abdomen. He stared at it, at the undeniable intention of its aim, and for a moment thought he saw his own face reflected back at him from the golden depths of the zanpakuto.

Then, in a flash, it was pulled away.

"No fear," Mayuri hummed, "how interesting."

"You said that you were going to- how did you put it?- make me feel better. Stabbing me would hardly be conducive to that."

"Such venom in your words. How did you not know that I was lying?"

"I could tell."

"How?"

"I could see it in your eyes."

Treachery once more from his very own eyes! He would have to work harder if he were ever to defeat such a terribly entangled foe. Mayuri glanced down at the younger man lying before him, and smiled widely. His teeth were gold, gleaming dully in the light, square as tombstones. The sort of teeth to tear flesh: the sort of teeth to eat you.

Kira smiled back, but it was weak, and empty of real sentiment.

He left that day perplexed and disturbed: after that moment the Captain had taken a foul air about him, and had dismissed him with a wave of the hand and the order to return the next day, promptly, at the same time. Though he knew not how this might cure him of his sorrows, he did, day after day: sometimes he was ordered to sit and talk about whatever he wished whilst the Captain stared at him, but those days he could never think of anything to say, all words struck right from his mind, half from fear, half from his bewildered anxiety. On other days he would take to the table again, to lie under a variety of procedures that Kurotsuchi deemed necessary to his cure. And what cure was this, exactly, that he was proposing?

Izuru still hadn't figured that one out.

And yet, despite that, he found himself becoming strangely reliant on this interludes of oddity in the mundane crawl that had become his post war life- he had become a two dimensional being floating between the detached work that he felt resigned to, and the grief that still struck him in the darkest moments of the night: not so much a grief for his Captain, anymore, for he had accepted that now, but more for his own sense of self-belief: since he had been manipulated into an unwitting half-betrayal of the people that he knew, cared for and owed complete allegiance to.

He still hadn't gotten over that.

The thought of his Captain filled him with bitterness from the inside outwards: reminded him that he had become everything that he had once sworn that he would not.

Mayuri never replied when Kira spoke his lilting and stilted thoughts aloud, only stared into his eyes as if searching for a depths of meaning that only he could see. Each time he returned from the Twelfth Division he stared deep into the mirror to see if he could spy quite what the Captain was looking for, but all he could see in the glass was plain grey, devoid of any wonder. Each day he thought that he would not return, yet when things had stopped making sense in his life he had begun to look for reason, and all of a sudden he was finding his solace from someone that had never made any sense to begin with. Kurotsuchi was the perfect distraction; the perfect comfort.

He had never been able to accept empathy. Mayuri never offered it.

Another day, another test: this time, a dripping and pointedly unnamed syringe full of a viscous, clear fluid into the prominent vein on the inside of his elbow; not anything that he was used to, it stormed his blood with a frenzy of coloured anger and peace, monochrome sorrow and joy.

He stared at the ceiling and saw butterflies escaping from the patterns of the shadows: he blinked, that they were gone.

He was sure that this was the closest thing to crazy that he had ever subjected himself to: to his surprise, he found that he wished he had done it sooner. There was something about letting go of his inhibitions entirely, thinking exactly what he wanted to think, that was incredibly liberating, though he couldn't move from the bench and such freedoms were only in his mind. Thoughts that he normally would not let himself think of crept from the cobwebbed corners of his ignored memory and presented themselves to him, but he could not be brought to tears by them, or to shame, or to desperate loneliness, for the colours were just too bright; a thousand colours, some of which he had no name for, blurring reality.

He was sure that he could feel a hand on the plane of his stomach, but in a moment it was gone, and he forgot it.

Mayuri leant over him, and Kira became aware suddenly of the colour of his eyes. They were amber, the sort that could petrify you: two twin dying planets glaring down at him with all the internal phosphorescence of decaying fire, of the prelude to an inverted explosion. They made him shiver, up and down his spine, in a way that he did not necessarily find unpleasant.

"Interesting," a disembodied voice said, "the pupils dilate, but I still see no emotion. Very interesting."

Izuru felt himself sink into the restless sleep of the chronic somnambulist: where nothing was quite as it seemed to be.

Somewhere in the obscure and barely reachable fathoms of his mind, he knew that he dreamt, and though he knew that he had never cared to recall his dreams (so often they were nightmares) this one had included limbs white in long-ago moonlight, that eerie and inexplicable grin, hoary and outside of true definition, hair as lustrous as the lunar glow that had served to illuminate the still tableaux of his once-fantasy, that had always been denied to him.

Gold and gold and gold; all silver, always silver.

Silvered intentions, shine distracting away from the truth behind every action. Gold eyes, raking his body and mind and soul. A silver smile, breaking him apart. Golden teeth, all the better to eat him with.

Twelve hours later he woke to darkness. The night had set in outside the un-curtained window, and no light had been turned on to herald his return to consciousness. An ache resounded around his head and through the limbs of his body as if he had been in a long and involved battle, but he was still lying on the table, still half-stripped though no longer strapped down. He flexed his body, and sat, but looking around him he realised that he was not alone. Mayuri was watching him, sitting on a high stool at the end of the table, eyes wide and alert. The rest of the laboratory was utterly empty, dead in the face of absolute night time, even though he was sure that normally many of the division members worked right through.

Mayuri's stare bored into him.

"Did you care for him?"

He stood, and cracked his neck as he turned his head from one side to another. He placed his hands on Kira's knees, searching his eyes for that always out-of-reach something.

"For who?"

Mayuri tsked between his teeth: his was a nature of little patience for ignorance. He leant a little closer, refusing to blink.

"For former-Captain-Ichimaru, of course."

The mention of Gin's name stilled the world: for Kira, as if always did, and for Mayuri, as that long despised ghost- the ghost that he had so hoped this one man was exempt from- raised his bitter and melancholic head from the depths of Kira's eyes. Mayuri was stunned, his belief proved impossible. He was not perfect, after all: he was living breathing talking screaming crying hoping loving clockwork. Clockwork killer, clockwork lover. The sort that defied all expectations.

The sort that ruined all your dreams.

Mayuri realised that he was still staring down at him, and closed his eyes.

This was not what he had anticipated, not at all. Had there always been emotion in Kira's eyes? Had he simply been ignoring it in his wish to find someone without it?

"Why would you ask that?"

Mayuri offered no answer, too busy mourning the loss of the ideal that he had treasured: that now, it seemed, he would not be able to have. Izuru lay back down on the table in the silence. A drop of water fell onto his bare stomach; he leant back, and another fell between his legs, onto the metal lab table. It sat there and refracted the light into beautiful rainbow oscillations, back and forth.

It took Mayuri a moment to realise that they had come from his own eyes, his eyes that were an object of such complete loathing to him.

Izuru looked up at him, and then wiped the tear off his skin with a finger, offering it to Mayuri's mouth with the ghost of a smile. Those eyes were still showing emotion, the sort that he had been convinced that they were incapable of, with the same assurance as if those cursed feelings had always been there: it was a detached sort of pity, as if he understood exactly what the strange and wayward Captain was going through. Mayuri reached his hands to touch his own face, to trace the tracks that the tears were making, and they came back in a blur of white and black paint, running off his skin.

The man on the bench touched his hand, and he took a step back. What with this? There was a strange feeling in him, to which he could not give a name, though he knew that if someone had said it to him he would have thought that the understood it completely. Passion overwhelmed him, and not the sort that he normally enjoyed, not the sort that provoked such genius of creation. More the sort that creeps upon you in the middle of the night and takes a tight hold of your chest and squeezes you tight.

The sort that you can never understand.

Mayuri looked at him.

Kira looked right back.

And in that moment time and space reconvened, and both became aware of a singular truth. Mayuri could never be the man that Izuru needed: Izuru had proved that he was no better than the rest of the useless sacks of flesh that Mayuri so despised. The world had ceased to be special, and in that, had become unique.

Right then, the two of them realised: perfection was a perfect ideal, but ideals never work in real life. Heroes die. Perfection never lasts, and with the stunning impartment of such wisdom Izuru let out a sigh, and sat back up again, to face the malignant and aborted transformation that was Mayuri: the man who now viewed him with an intensity equal to that of Kira's own.

Silence covered them; Izuru reached out a hand.

Perhaps, sometimes, what isn't right fits best, after all.

* * *

Kira slept soundly through the lingering remainder of the night-time, and for the first time in months did not once dream about his former Captain. He woke refreshed: many people commented the next day that it looked like that 'cure' had worked in the end, after all.

Mayuri tossed and he turned that night until he eventually succumbed to a long-denied sleep: it was punctuated by the image of eyes in which, for the briefest of moments, he had witnessed true perfection.

Dead eyes. How beautiful they had been. How terrible.

A hot body, coiled in restless and naked slumber, warming the bed beside him, a bed that had been too cold for too long a time. For all his genius, he still didn't know what this meant.

Any of it.

Skin next to his.

How tragic.


End file.
